The Latest NIV

The 2011 update to the NIV translation of the Bible is due out this month (the online version has been available since last Fall). One of the major goals of this translation was to provide a more "gender-inclusive" translation. The issue is that original languages (Greek and Hebrew) often used masculine pronouns ("he," "him," "his") and related words in ways that were intended to include both genders. The new NIV, along with the earlier TNIV and the NRSV, attempt to provide a version that doesn't grammatically exclude women.

This is a noble goal. For those passages that are clearly intended to apply to men and women alike, we want the text somehow to reflect that. No one should feel like an afterthought in God's plan. But this approach to translation is not without its difficulties:

• Many gender-neutral translations change passages that really should be left in the masculine. For example, being a "son of God" is not exactly equivalent to being a "child of God." Not that sons are better than daughters, but that there were certain unique aspects to the sonship relationship in the culture of the author that get lost in these translations - the idea of inheritance, responsibility, carrying on the family name, and so on. Those ideas are part of the imagery of the phrase, but we lose it when the translation only focuses on the more generic child relationship.
• In order to make a passage gender-neutral, often times the translator has to resort to an awkward phrase (for example, using "sons and daughters" every time "sons" occurs). The extra wording can clutter up a sentence easily. Using the masculine, with an inclusive meaning, reads more smoothly.
• Or, the translator will use a plural ("they," "them," "theirs") instead of the singular in order to neuter the sentence. This effectively takes gender out of it, but then you've changed the nuance of a phrase, losing the personal touch of an individual relationship with God, and sometimes sounding grammatically incorrect.

The noble goal has plenty of landmines. An attempt to clarify the meaning of a passage can actually skew the meaning of the passage, which by definition would be a poor translation.

For more information about the new NIV and the translation choices they made, see the following websites: http://www.cbmw.org/Blog/Posts/CBMW-Responds-to-New-NIV2011 and http://galvestondailynews.com/ap/bee3b4/.

The NET (http://net.bible.org) does a very reasonable job of indicating when a passage is meant to be gender-inclusive. They make pretty good choices of when to retain the masculine wording, and every time they choose a more gender-inclusive phrase than the original language, they make a clear note of it. So, you always know what the original said, plus you get a good indication of which verses are meant to transcend gender.

The interesting point for me in this is the translation principle - if the text says "men," but the text means "men and women," what's the best way to translate it? If it says "men" and means "men," then the answer is simple (but some translations still change it!). But should a translation mirror the verbal text or the meaning of the text? The answer is that both can be good choices, as long as the reader knows what you've done. The translator should either leave the text alone and let the readers and commentators decide, or they should change the text with a clear note of what the original says. That's why I like the NET - they do this well. Only when it's obvious to be inclusive should the translator even consider a more inclusive phrase. When in doubt, the translation should leave the text as is.

Translating the Bible is filled with difficult choices. With the hub-bub around the new NIV, I don't want to immediately criticize it just because some gender-loaded terms got translated in an inclusive way. That can be a valid translation. However, as the CBMW article above notes, there are enough of unnecessary changes in the new NIV, changes that skew the meaning, to be a very strong concern. (Furthermore, there are enough difficulties with the current NIV that I choose not to use it, and especially not for teaching.)

We should all know that the original languages used the masculine for a convenient and clear style, not to exclude women from God's grace. A good friend of ours, Dr. Fred Sanders, made the recent observation that it's not just the women who have to tolerate being called "sons of God" - we men have to tolerate being called the "bride of Christ"!

Overwhelmed!

The images from Japan are overwhelming. Not only the largest earthquake in an earthquake prone country, not only thirty foot walls of water washing in, then washing out, entire neighborhoods, but living on the verge of a catastrophic nuclear disaster. I watched one video clip showing house after house being picked up and carried away like they were made of Styrofoam, and the only sound was that of dozens of people wailing as they watched their material lives float away and then crumble to bits.

It's so overwhelming. It's too much to see, too much to fathom, too much to feel adequately. I can't comprehend four nuclear reactors each in crisis. I can't imagine entire neighborhoods gone in seconds. I can't (and don't want to) envision thousands of casualties, let alone the likely hundreds of thousands. The years it will take to recover are too complex to consider. I feel badly for the victims, but I also feel badly because I can't feel badly enough. What I'm able to feel is far too small compared to what needs to be felt.

My tendency, like so many, is to shut myself off emotionally. Since I can't feel it adequately, my first reaction is to feel nothing. Then I won't feel so inadequate. I know there have been many tragedies of this scale in the past, and there will be more. And that thought makes me shut down all the more, because if just one of these overwhelms me, dozens of them absolutely bury me.

Part of the reason we feel overwhelmed is because we want to be adequate for whatever faces us. We want to have adequate solutions to the problems that arise. We want to provide adequate help - at least enough to make a real difference. We want to be adequate emotionally, that we can feel enough for the magnitude of the tragedies we face. And when we don't feel adequate, we feel overwhelmed. We feel the devastation of the tragedy - and on top of that, we feel the inadequacies - and on top of that, we feel overwhelmed.

But, does God ask us to be adequate? Does He expect us to provide all the adequate solutions? Does He expect us to provide adequate help to make things better? Does He expect us to have adequate enough feelings to match the magnitude of the situation? Or perhaps He expects to just do a little token something so that we can feel like we've done something?

God does not put on us the responsibility to be adequate for monumental tragedy. He does not call us to fix world catastrophes. What He does ask of us is to give ourselves to Him, especially when life situations are too big, especially when we are inadequate. He even asks us to give Him our inadequacies themselves. There are problems He allows that are bigger than we are, and in them, He wants us to give ourselves entirely to Him. So, when we pray and when we find ways to help, our goal should be to give ourselves to Him, not to feel like we've done something, or to presume that we're adequate to solve it.

We should give all of ourselves. We should pray fervently, give generously, and even help selflessly. But not in an effort to feel adequate or to escape being overwhelmed. We pray, give, and help as an act of giving our inadequate selves to the God who is completely, overwhelmingly adequate.

Universalist?

Rob Bell is causing quite a stir in the blogosphere this past week. The pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, and author of the controversial book Velvet Elvis is releasing a new book on March 15 called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Bell is part of the emergent church movement, which is a widely varied group, marked primarily by questioning traditional views of propositional truth, epistemology, and church. Bell embraces a number of post-modern tenets. Some of his questions are thought-provoking and worth discussing. Some of his thoughts, in my opinion, lead Christians away from knowable, Scriptural, propositional truth.

What has caused the stir is Bell's own promotional video for Love Wins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODUvw2McL8g). In the video, he asks question after question that call into question our traditional views about Heaven and Hell. The words are carefully crafted - he certainly seems to be promoting universalism (i.e., all will be saved, no matter what they believe), but he never comes right out and says it plainly. But he clearly wants the viewer to at least suspect that he's a universalist.

The buzz in the blogs is whether he's truly embracing universalism, or merely perpetrating a clever campaign to sell his book. If he's embracing universalism, he's clearly promoting an unscriptural view. If his book is orthodox, but he's promoting sales with a provocative ad, then he's running dangerously close to deception and manipulation. Either way, the ad is disturbing. (I find some of his counterarguments in the video to be unfair "straw man" arguments - inaccurately representing the opposing view, then tearing down the misrepresented view.)

Either way, we should wait until March 15 to see what's really in the book before leveling specific criticisms. Many have launched severe criticism based on the video, without having the book to read. We should wait, but the early indications don't look good.

The challenge, however, is that views like universalism are easier to swallow than the harsh reality that some will endure God's wrath forever for rejecting His revealed grace. Because universalism is easier to swallow, people are embracing it. Meanwhile, Jesus is clear about the reality of Hell, with passages like Matthew 8:11-12. It's not an easy truth, but it's the only way that Scripture's call to believe in Christ has any importance.

What if we really believed that...

What if we really, truly, deeply believed that Hell is just as horrible as Scripture describes?

What if we really believed that God's Word has its own power, once it's shared?

What if we really believed that God hears and answers prayers according to His will?

What if we really believed that God draws people to Himself?

What if we really believed that we can't do anything on our own to convince one's soul that it needs Christ?

What if we really believed that as we reach out to love others in faith that God will do things beyond our own abilities?

What if we really believed that apart from Him we can do nothing, but if we abide in Him, He will bear much fruit through us?

What if we really believed that the only way to save our lives is to lose them?

If we really, truly, deeply believed these things, would we live differently?

I'm not suggesting that none of us believe these things. It's not hard to find people who completely agree with all these ideas. But the question is what if we trusted these truths so much that we lived in a way that depended on them being true? In other words, what if our actions were based primarily on the faith that these truths are exactly as the Word tells us they are? What if we lived so dangerously that if any of these statements weren't true, we would be the world's biggest fools?

What if what we believed is what we completed trusted?

I never advocate "blind faith" - faith without knowledge. God gives us reason after reason to trust Him - faith in Him is a rational act. When the Word exhorts us to "walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Cor 5:7), it means that based on God's known character, we can live "dangerously" - we can live trusting that all these ideas are really, truly, deeply true.

Does He Love Something Because It's Good, or is Something Good Because He Loves It?

A clever college student recently asked me this question. He was in a philosophy class studying Plato's account of Socrates' trial, and the question came up in class - is the virtuous thing virtuous because God loves it (i.e., His love of it makes it virtuous), or does God love the virtuous thing because of the fact that it's already virtuous (i.e., it possesses virtue, therefore God loves it).

On the one hand, if something is made virtuous by God's love for it, then the "goodness" of something is not an absolute attribute - it is not good apart from God's love for it. Furthermore, whatever God chooses to not love would thereby be made "bad," and God becomes the cause of evil.

On the other hand, if God loves something because it is good, then we have something that is good apart from God. This would mean that something other than God defined it to be good, and then we would have someone telling God what to consider good and what to consider bad. Someone would have taken away one of God's attributes.

Either way, we end up with a scenario we don't like.

After tossing this idea around for a bit, realizing that learned philosophers could very quickly and easily show me where my ideas are full of holes, I came to the opinion that my friend was facing a false dichotomy. He was given "A" and "B" as the only two possible answers - that it must be "A" or it must be "B." I think there is a better option than these two.

Something is "good" only as much as it resembles God's character. An act of kindness is only as good as its resemblance to God's kindness. A generous act is only as good as its resemblance to God's generosity. Love is only as good as it resembles the God of love. By the same token, something is "bad" to the degree that it departs from God's character. A lie departs from the character of the God of truth. Hatred departs from the character of the God of love.

The goodness of something does not exist apart from God, but is defined by God's character. Goodness is not a quality that exists apart from God's existence and nature. God loves something because it resembles His own character, not because it possesses its own good character apart from Him.

So, neither option is true. Something is not made good because God loves it. God doesn't love something because it has the independent quality of being good. The goodness of something is determined by its resemblance to God, and God loves the things that have that resemblance.

What does this matter? Is this just a philosophical treadmill, upon which you run and run, but never get anywhere?

I believe it's important at least in the point that God also loves us sinners, but not because we're good! That's how amazing grace is! He loves us anyway. He love us despite the fact that we don't strongly resemble His character. We are naturally quite unlike His character, and yet we are still the objects of His love. Furthermore, if we become more "good" by resembling Him more, He loves to see that, but He doesn't love us more because of it. He already loves us completely. We cannot garner more of God's love by becoming more "good" (even though He loves to see us become more "good").

Grace, then, allows us to be treated as perfectly "good," perfectly like God's character, even though we don't resemble Him that much (yet!). And then in Christ, His love for us will eventually make us that good - He will cause us to resemble Christ (1 John 3:1-3).

God's grace is truly amazing! Scandalous even.

More on Structure

Last week, we looked at Eph 1:3-14 to see how seeing the structure of a passage can help us to understanding it more fully. In that passage, we saw a threefold structure to highlight the work of each Person of the Trinity. I mentioned then that the next article would look at Eph 2 to look for a structure and see how it helps us understand the passage.

First, read Eph 2. Some of your Bibles likely have some section headings, which were added by the translators or publishers. They are not part of the original text, and sometimes they are not always placed where I would place them. They can be helpful at times, but always check to see if perhaps you think they might be misplaced.

Answer the question (without the help of the added section headings): What is Eph 2 about?

Eph 2 has two main parts to it. Look for them. They might be marked by a topic change, by a phrase that starts a new idea, or other clue that helps the reader know that there's a new thought coming. Try to find the two major sections before continuing.

In this case, most of your section headings are likely correct. The first section is from v. 1 through v. 10, and the second is from v. 11 through v. 22.

These two sections have parallel structures to each other! Each half of the chapter has two subsections. In this case, there's a repeated idea in each section to mark off the beginning of the second half of each section. Look for a repeated key idea that subdivides both vv. 1-10 and vv. 11-22. Try to find it before continuing.

The repeated key idea is "but God..." (in v. 4, "but God," and in v. 13, "but now in Christ Jesus"). So now we have the main structure: vv. 1-10 (with subsections 1-3 and 4-10) and vv. 11-22 (with subsections 11-12 and 13-22).

Now, look at the subsections, and look at how the "but God" idea changes things from one subsection to the next. What was true in vv. 1-3 and 11-12? What is now true in vv. 4-10 and 12-22? What is it that God did so that "but God" changes us from what was true to what is now true?

Now, re-answer the question. What is Eph 2 about?

The Other Valuable Lesson on Bible Study

In my previous article, I talked about one of the toughest classes I ever had, and the valuable lesson I learned about studying the Bible by learning how to ask good questions about the Scripture. There are plenty of ways to find the answers, but asking good questions first will help lead you to the most valuable answers. I mentioned that this was one of two highly valuable methods I've learned to study the Word.

The second method sounds more scary than it really is. I have learned that finding the basic structure of a passage is tremendously helpful in studying what it means. Yikes! That's sounds hard and complicated! It can be, depending on how deep you want to go, but it doesn't have to be all that complicated.

Learning how to do this is more than a single article can teach, but I want to at least give you a favorite example of mine. Read Ephesians 1:3-14. Take a second to answer the question, "What is this passage about?"

There's a three-part structure to this passage. In this case, the three-part structure is marked by a phrase that is repeated. Look for it - see if you can find a phrase repeated three times in the passage. It's not verbatim the same, but it's close, and it's important to the passage. (Look for it on your own, but if you get stuck, keep reading for a hint.)

(Hint: Look in verses 6, 12, and 14.)

The repeated phrase is "to the praise of His glory," or something similar. If you didn't find it, stop and look for it until you see it.

Now, who is each one of these phrases talking about? (It's not the same person in each case.) Take a look before continuing.

That phrase occurs once for each person of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And that gives us a basic structure of Eph 1:3-14 (vv. 3-10 are about the Father, 11-12 are about the Son, and 13-14 are about the Holy Spirit). Furthermore, each section tells us something about the unique ministry of each one. Plus, the passage as a whole shows us the Trinity (without even using the word "trinity").

Now, re-read the passage and re-answer the question we asked before, "What is this passage about?" Did the structure give you a deeper answer to the question (even a little)?

Finding the structure of a passage can help us understand it much better. Next week, we'll look at the structure of chapter 2 and how that helps us understand it better.